After his final exile, Napoleon presented himself as a martyr to the cause of liberty whose goal was to create a European “federation of free people.” Few were convinced by this “gospel according to St. Helena” (Excerpt 1). Followers such as Emmanuel de Las Cases burnished the Napoleonic legend, but detractors such as Benjamin Constant viewed him as a tyrant (Excerpt 2). For all his defects, Napoleon fascinated even those who were too young to understand his rise and fall. The French romantic poet Victor Hugo celebrated both the glory and the tragedy of Napoleonic ambitions (Excerpt 3).
1. Napoleon’s Own View from Exile
As might be expected, Napoleon put the most positive possible construction on his plans for France. In exile he wrote letters and talked at length to Emmanuel de Las Cases (1766–1842), an aristocratic officer in the royal navy who rallied to Napoleon in 1802, served in the Council of State, and later accompanied him to St. Helena. Much of what we know about Napoleon’s views comes from a book published by Las Cases in 1821.
March 3, 1817:
In spite of all the libels, I have no fear whatever about my fame. Posterity will do me justice. The truth will be known; and the good I have done will be compared with the faults I have committed. I am not uneasy as to the result. Had I succeeded, I would have died with the reputation of the greatest man that ever existed. As it is, although I have failed, I shall be considered as an extraordinary man: my elevation was unparalleled, because unaccompanied by crime. I have fought fifty pitched battles, almost all of which I have won. I have framed and carried into effect a code of laws that will bear my name to the most distant posterity. I raised myself from nothing to be the most powerful monarch in the world. Europe was at my feet. I have always been of the opinion that the sovereignty lay in the people. In fact, the imperial government was a kind of republic. Called to the head of it by the voice of the nation, my maxim was, la carrière est ouverte aux talents [“careers open to talent”] without distinction of birth or fortune, and this system of equality is the reason that your oligarchy hates me so much.
Source: R. M. Johnston, The Corsican: A Diary of Napoleon’s Life in His Own Words (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1921), 492.
2. Benjamin Constant, Spokesman for the Liberal Opposition to Napoleon
Benjamin Constant (1767–1830) came from an old French Calvinist family that had fled to Switzerland to escape persecution. Constant spent the early years of the French Revolution in a minor post at a minor German court. He moved to Paris in 1795 and became active in French politics during the Directory. Under Napoleon he went into exile, where he published a romantic novel, Adolphe (1806), and pamphlets like this one attacking Napoleon. He reconciled to Napoleon during the Hundred Days and then opposed the restored Bourbon monarchy. In this selection, written during his exile, he expresses his hostility to Napoleon as a usurper dependent on war to maintain himself in power.
Surely, Bonaparte is a thousand times more guilty than those barbarous conquerors who, ruling over barbarians, were by no means at odds with their age. Unlike them, he has chosen barbarism; he has preferred it. In the midst of enlightenment, he has sought to bring back the night. He has chosen to transform into greedy and bloodthirsty nomads a mild and polite people: his crime lies in this premeditated intention, in his obstinate effort to rob us of the heritage of all the enlightened generations who have preceded us on this earth. But why have we given him the right to conceive such a project?
When he first arrived here, alone, out of poverty and obscurity, and until he was twenty-four, his greedy gaze wandering over the country around him, why did we show him a country in which any religious idea was the object of irony? [Constant refers here to de-Christianization during the French Revolution.] When he listened to what was professed in our circles, why did serious thinkers tell him that man had no other motivation than his own interest? . . .
Because immediate usurpation was easy, he believed it could be durable, and once he became a usurper, he did all that usurpation condemns a usurper to do in our century.
It was necessary to stifle inside the country all intellectual life: he banished discussion and proscribed the freedom of the press.
The nation might have been stunned by that silence: he provided, extorted or paid for acclamation which sounded like the national voice. . . . War flung onto distant shores that part of the French nation that still had some real energy. It prompted the police harassment of the timid, whom it could not force abroad. It struck terror into men’s hearts, and left there a certain hope that chance would take responsibility for their deliverance: a hope agreeable to fear and convenient to inertia. How many times have I heard men who were pressed to resist tyranny postponing this, during wartime till the coming of peace, and in peacetime until war commences!
I am right therefore in claiming that a usurper’s sole resource is uninterrupted war. Some object: what if Bonaparte had been pacific? Had he been pacific, he would never have lasted for twelve years. Peace would have re-established communication among the different countries of Europe. These communications would have restored to thought its means of expression. Works published abroad would have been smuggled into the country. The French would have seen that they did not enjoy the approval of the majority of Europe.
Source: Benjamin Constant, “Further Reflections on Usurpation,” in Political Writings, trans. Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 161–63.
3. Victor Hugo, “The Two Islands” (1825)
Victor Hugo (1802–1885) was France’s greatest romantic poet and novelist, author of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Misérables. His father was a Napoleonic general, but his mother was an equally ardent royalist. In this early poem, Hugo compares Napoleon to one of Napoleon’s favorite icons, the eagle, symbol of empire. The two islands of the title are Corsica, Napoleon’s birthplace, and St. Helena, his place of final exile and death.
These Isles, where Ocean’s shattered spray
Upon the ruthless rocks is cast,
Seem like two treacherous ships of prey,
Made by eternal anchors fast.
The hand that settled bleak and black
Those shores on their unpeopled rack,
And clad in fear and mystery,
Perchance thus made them tempest-torn,
That Bonaparte might there be born,
And that Napoleon there might die. . . .
He his imperial nest hath built so far and high,
He seems to us to dwell within that tranquil sky,
Where you shall never see the angry tempest break.
’Tis but beneath his feet the growling storms are sped,
And thunders to assault his head
Must to their highest source go back.
The bolt flew upwards: from his eyrie [nest] riven,
Blazing he falls beneath the stroke of heaven;
Then kings their tyrant foe reward—
They chain him, living, on that lonely shore;
And earth captive giant handed o’er
To ocean’s more resistless guard. . . .
Shame, hate, misfortune, vengeance, curses sore,
On him let heaven and earth together pour:
Now, see we dashed the vast Colossus low.
May he forever rue, alive and dead,
All tears he caused mankind to shed,
And all the blood he caused to flow.
Source: Henry Carrington, Translations from the Poems of Victor Hugo (London: Walter Scott, 1885), 34–41.
Questions to Consider